John Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, working as one of Pablo Escobar’s
top hit men, killed at least 300 people and was implicated in the
deaths of 3,000 more.

Velásquez, aka Popeye, was a key functionary in Escobar’s
Medellin cartel. And, as he claimed in an interview earlier this
month, his duties extended to meeting with Latin American
luminaries and national leaders on behalf of the cartel.

Speaking with Puerto Rico’s Wapa TV, Popeye
said that he hand-delivered letters from Escobar to Colombian
literary icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who then passed the letters
on to Fidel and Raul Castro.

“I am going to give you a key bit of information: The link
between everyone [Escobar, Cuba and the US] is called Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Laureate,” Popeye
said, according to Colombia Reports.

“Raul Castro received cocaine on behalf of Pablo Escobar and
Fidel was aware,” Popeye
said in an interview with the Argentine outlet Todo Noticias.
He
added that Raul Castro was responsible for cocaine’s arrival
in Miami.

“I was in Mexico carrying a letter to the Nobel Laureate for Raul
and Fidel Castro; a manuscript of Escobar’s,” Popeye said.

“When I got off the plane the Mexican police were waiting for me
and took me to where ‘Gabo’ was signing autographs,” he
continued, according to Colombia Reports. “He called me aside and
said, ‘Popeye, where is the letter?’ and I gave it to him.”

In the message, Popeye
told Todo Noticias, “Pablo Escobar was asking Fidel for a
Russian submarine to carry the drug from Mexico to Havana, and
with this submarine, to Miami.”

“That (Fidel) is not a world leader, he is a dictator and a
bandit,” Popeye
said, according to Clarín. “I was in Key West, I saw the
drug.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian novelist and journalist, is a
revered figure in Latin America, known best for magical realism,
the literary style used in his well-known 1967 work, “One Hundred
Years of Solitude.”

He
won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, and his death in
early 2014 triggered an outpouring of grief from around the
world.

He was friendly with Fidel Castro for much of his life. Garcia
Marquez’s politics and his
links to Castro prompted the
FBI to spy on him for 24 years.

Popeye, 52, has become something of a public figure since his
release,
calling himself “the historical memory of the Medellín
Cartel.”

Prior to his release in August last year for “good
behavior,” he speculated that there was an
80% chance former rivals would kill him.

In the
interview, he described on camera how he kidnapped and killed
Colombian functionaries as ordered by Escobar.

In
this June 27, 2006, file photo, John Jairo Velasquez, a former
hit man for Pablo Escobar, gives his testimony while holding a
book titledAP Photo/ William
Fernando Martinez

He is also
reportedly responsible for the 1989 bombing of Avianca Flight
203 in Colombia, which killed 107 people, and for the
assassination of presidential candidate Luis Galán, which plunged
the country into a bloody period of narco violence.

Popeye stressed that
he was not formally linking the world-famous Garcia Marquez to
the Medellin network, only that the novelist “served as a link by
delivering letters.”

“I never said that he read the letters and that he was a
trafficker,” Popeye
said, according to Colombia Reports.